Michael Palermo welcomes Kevin Ashley to the show as they discuss how Kevin has made over $100k on his Windows 8 apps. Tune in as they discuss some tips and tricks for how you can improve your app revenue like how to properly price your app and various monetization options that are available to you such as in-app purchase, pay-per download and advertising.

Jeremy Foster and I had no idea what kind of response resulted from presenting our free training course to prepare for the 70-480 exam. For example, who knew that our shirts (purchased from the Microsoft Store the day prior) would become so popular, people contacting both of us wondering where they could buy one?

That said, the real story is in the successful outcomes of those who watched the videos and then subsequently passed the exam. Even more impressive to me personally is that some already have apps submitted to the Windows Store! (Do you have an app in the store? If not, consider 30,000 reasons why you should submit your app now!)

A Jump Start to the Jump Start

I want to give a Matthew Hughes in the United Kingdom recognition for his outstanding coverage of this course. He took meticulous, detailed notes on every topic. I have organized his blog posts below:

Please be part of my app experiment. I recently submitted my first app to the Windows Store, and I want you to be involved. No, I am not asking for you to pay for it, because it is free. No, I am not asking for you to give it a high rating, as that would give me a false sense of the app’s real value and an unfair advantage for competing apps. So what am I asking for? And how can you benefit from getting involved?

First, let me formally introduce you to the app – Tile of Time. In order to appreciate your potential involvement, please consider the following excerpt from the app’s description in the store

Tile of Time is an app dedicated to making it very simple to know what time it is. This app is deliberately simple because it is meant to have more features added only at the request of the community. In other words, this app will improve and get better based on your feedback!

If you are a developer, can you appreciate how difficult it was for me to release an app so simplistic in nature, it felt unfinished? Mind you, the release in the store is complete, and does what is says it does. However, based on the description above, the intent of the app is to evolve with more features based on feedback from the community. You see, I truly believe app development is an ongoing process that should yield to a great degree to the consumers.

So how can you be involved? Please download the app and provide me feedback. Consider an example of one of the app’s first reviews from a user in the United Kingdom:

Very simple feedback (thanks Chris), and a feature I look forward to implementing.

Now, how do you benefit from this? I am documenting this journey and will provide all my lessons learned so that you – an aspiring app developer – can accelerate your development cycle with great efficiency. The more feedback I receive, the better tips & tricks you get.

I look forward to your feedback! I would prefer the feedback through the reviews at the Windows Store, as this is part of the experiment. However, if you have a need to reach me otherwise, please send me your thoughts through this contact page.

Two overlapping trends have chipped away at CES and events like it: First, software and services have become the soul of consumer technology. Hardware (seriously doesn't the word "electronics" in the conference's dusty title make your eyes instantly droop a bit?) has become increasingly commoditized into blank vessels that do little more than hold Facebook and Twitter and the App Store and Android and iOS. And the best and most interesting vessels, increasingly, are made by the very companies making the software.

So here I am off to my first CES and I find out that it is a slowly diminishing event. That is the bad news (for me personally, never being there in its days of glory). The good news is what I noticed in the highlighted quote above (for me personally, because I am a software developer). Yes, it is a great time to be a software developer!

In fact, the very reason I am heading to CES is to participate at the CEA MoDev Hackathon sponsored by the Travel Channel. The hackathon is all about writing apps. Apps are far more relevant in this technology world than the gadgets that host them. I know this to be true. I am aware of so many individuals that refused switching to superior hardware with better features because that gadget did not have a certain app in its store.

So I am a little discouraged my first CES is not a representation of what it use to be. But I am not too disappointed. I mean, I might be finding my next TV there…

I have recently acquired GameMaker by Yo Yo Games for cross-platform game development. Among the supported platforms are Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8!

This gaming tool allows anyone with decent computer skills to develop a game rapidly. I recently lead a group of students (many who had never written a single line of code before) to create a simple game in one hour. I could not believe how much the students accomplished in such a short period of time.